leisure
Blenheim in sunshine
Monday, April 6th, 2009 | leisure, photography | 1 Comment
I thought it was time for another picture post. So here’s a panorama of the garden in Blenheim Palace with the house itself in the background. (Click on the picture to enlarge)
Another bit of changed perspective
Friday, March 20th, 2009 | leisure, photography | No Comments
It seems that I’ve got a theme on changing perspective going on. Tha must be because it’s always intriguing to feel that little click that happens when you see things in an ever-so-slightly different way. Here’s a picture that that changes your perspective in an ever-so-funny way - that’s a good thing to see on a Friday!
Putting things in perspective
Sunday, February 15th, 2009 | leisure | No Comments
It is often good for troubles to be put in perspective. I’ve so far been lucky enough that most of mine have been bumps small enough to be all but obliterated by the weight of just a little perspective. I came upon a short animation that I find quite humbling, since it does that to the entire human civilization. That, with a healthy pinch of humour… and lichen. Enjoy!
Fun in the snow 2
Thursday, February 12th, 2009 | leisure, photography | No Comments
Four pictures in one post are too many, I’ve decided, and split this post into two parts.
… On the quieter times of our little outing - and also where I was actually the one holding the camera, this is what came out (yes, I DID make some fun people sledding down small bumps shots as well). The first piccie of the snowy meadow was my attempt to play with the RAW format in Adobe camera RAW. I love the way you can manipulate the photos almost indefinitely doing no damage at all to the actual image - and the fantastic effects you can achieve doing it.
The second picture of the boats on the canal is another of my attempts at HDR - I’m quite happy with this one. Again, having a camera that actaully has auto bracketing helps immensely by eliminating the need to fiddle about with controld when what you’re supposed ot be doing, is keeping your camera absolutely still. This one was even taken without a tripod - although I did have something to lean the camera against.
Well, this is the photographic fun for this round - I’ll have to go do some more shooting soon.
P.S. a word of warning - or rather regret: the pictures don’t come out very well on most browsers it seems - I’m much more happier looking at them in my photoshop and preview rather than in the web.
Fun in the snow
Thursday, February 12th, 2009 | leisure, photography | No Comments
Firstly, thanks to Joe for lending me his old SLR! It’s so much more fun to have a real camera - there’s just something about having something solid in your hand, where absolutely everything is adjustable - it just invites you to explore the possibilities. The possibilities explored on our (the camera’s and mine) little outing were not all that many - but we sure had fun together (well, my friends who were participating in the outing were included in the fun).
..And Rachel said: I dare you to take your shoes off. And I replied (with about 0.3 seconds delay): sure! (knowing full well that she’d have to do it too if I did it). And so it came about that I was running in the snow in my bare feet and having considerable fun - and Rachel was perhaps slightly regretting her dare - but putting on a brave face. I turned out to have the most frost-resistant feet of the two of us. 
Uniclock
Saturday, January 31st, 2009 | leisure | No Comments
This is probably one of the most fantastic pieces of advertising that I’ve seen: the uniclock. Advertising woolly jumpers by the Japanese clothing company Uniqlo, it’s uplifting - especially if you’re a bit of a fan of modern dance - and ALMOST makes me want to by a pair of gloves. Almost.
It’s really quite addictive as well - I find myself having the music running in the background to whatever I’m doing and then once in a while switching over to look at the dancers and just stare at the clock for a disproportionately long stretch of time. So beware!
(N.B. It can take a while to load - detracting from the strength of the advert, no doubt - so give it some time.)
Mental note to self…
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 | leisure, photography | No Comments
… to get creative! I stumbled upon the work of Jason Lee, who has an on-going project of photographing his daughters. His work is fantastically creative and it just reminds me that it’s time to get out there and experiment. So I thought I’d post one of my latest experiments to evidence that experimenting is indeed lots of fun.
I find that I easily get stuck in a rut once I get an idea (such as the HDR shots) and fail to actually have fun with the camera. Even the subjects I consider for my shots become somewhat uniform (sorry to all the people I’ve ever dragged into churches to just look at the light and then discard the resulting pictures because I’ve already got a dozen others exactly like that).
This series of not-particularly-serious pictures were taken by mum and me on our little getaway in Portugal.
Something about being on the ocean at the end of summer made us run arond and jump with joy (and occasionally contract ourselves …mmm.. myself into quite obscure poses). Hope you enjoy these. (Click pictures for full view)
How to cook a Jackalope - or teaching grandparents to use the internet
Saturday, January 24th, 2009 | learning, leisure, reflection | 1 Comment
Having been neglecting my web-presence for altogether too long, I’m now back with a tale of (almost) first time computer use. For Christmas I gave my grandad my old laptop, which - although it’s not spring chicken - is a jolly decent machine and was mostly written off because I so wanted a Mac instead. The laptop was freshly installed with a Russian version of Windows XP, Outlook express set up to receive mail from grandad’s email address, virus protection installed (all the while trying to keep my grandma from bursting into the room and ruining the surprise), and the whole thing was wrapped up (more or less) neatly and shoved under the Christmas tree along with another couple of thousand presents (in my family it takes hours to get through the whole heap - although we’re not that many - and the oohs and aahs take up most of the night).
It was not their first computer - in fact they’ve been getting family write-offs for a while, and my grandma is quite attached to her own laptop which she uses exclusively for running a vintage version of MultiLex (a German-Russian dictionary). Grandad was quite fond of his email, but due to the fact that they have a modem connection (!!) and that his old machine would benefit from being upgraded with a hand crank, email was not speedy. Especially for receiving photos or other large-ish files. When he came to my mum’s place this Christmas, he brought the sad remains of the old laptop with him lamenting that a visiting toddler had broken it. I was quite grateful to the little terrorist for putting this piece of by now rather brittle plastic out of it’s misery and removing all discussion about whether it could be somehow revitalised.
In other words, my grandad was quite chuffed when he received my old well-loved (read: scratched and missing a couple of keys) machine on Christmas eve. From then on he was hooked. The fast (ish) internet and a computer that actually computes made for a whole new experience for him. Every morning by the time his lazy granddaughter (i.e. me) would get out of bed, he’d have accumulated a list of questions to be asked and problems to be solved. He would read his email from his surprisingly wide (i.e. existant) list of electronic correspondents (granted, his email was quite extensively fed by my mum forwarding him all sort of silly jokes) and surfing the web.
It was interesting to observe what a person who’d never really been on the web would do with it. Conclusion was - mostly nothing unless you show them something. My grandparents could in the beginning simply not imagine what to do with the web. They knew it’s out there, but had no concrete applications for it in mind - apart from email that it. Instant letters - that’s something that’s easy to grasp. So we started feeding them with ideas of what to use this technology for. I showed grandad that he could get the television programme online (oh, happy days for him and less happy for everybody else, since the tv’s on too much of the time already!!) - that was something useful. Then I set him up with an iGoogle front page to his browser where he could get a daily joke and the BBC news in Russian. News in the Russian-speaking-only community who do not have access to the internet is somewhat a lop-sided affair in that you get a very specific angle on everything. Therefore adding a BBC angle to their access to information was quite exciting.
That’s where the Jackalope comes in to the picture. My mum brought a bit of game from a hunt she’d been to - a hare and a pheasant - and my grandma was charged with preparing the hare for human consumption on New Year’s eve. We also (not so gently) hinted that recipes could be found online. And so it came about that for the next 4 days we talked about nothing but cooking hare (we generally don’t do much but eat in the holidays anyway, but this was a special kind of eating, thus requiring more discussion). Eventually mum and I proposed that if we combined the pheasant and the hare and maybe even found a bit of venison that we’d have excellent jackalope stew to wow the guests. Grandma disagreed because the internet had told her otherwise and besides, she’d like to actually taste every ingredient rather than just mix it all up.
Jackalope being dispensed with, how did the older generation fare on the web? Surprisingly well - it is not difficult to understand the basic affordances of the web: quick access to almost limitless amounts of information on almost anything. But there were also some interesting hickups in their web-exploration. Firstly I’ve discovered that it’s not obvious what ‘the internet’ is. I found myself explaining why the email client was not ‘the internet’, how it was just an application that received information through the web. Also it was necessary to explain what a browser is - in terms of a window through which you can look for stuff on the web, again, not ‘the internet’ itself. All these metafors were proving necessary to better be able to explain how certain things happen (for example I confused grandad by logging on to the web-mail client that goes with his email account - why was his post in multiple places and why did the same content look different??) Also, it’s not obvious how it works - as in: clicking on the blue underlined words takes you somewhere. On first seeing a google search result they did not immediately realise that all those items took them through to different pages each containing some information - they were so interested to find all these snippets of information there to be had, that they didn’t even notice that they were incomplete at first. Once we got past that hurdle and they saw how to get to the full items of information we immediately faced a new challenge.
That’s something the Jackalope experience showed very clearly: that we well-wandered-webbies have some extraordinarily strong filters installed in our heads that permit us to disregard most of the rubbish that we’re presented with on the web. With all the talk of information literacy and information overload, it didn’t really permeate into my brain until I saw what a lack of such filters does to people’s internet experience. I imagine it’s a bit like hearing every single conversation in a crowded room or like hearing all the discrete noises in traffic - it’s a pandemonium of impressions. Once we had entered ‘hare recipe’ into Google and got a set of results, she started from the top and proceeded downwards indiscriminately. She had none of the feel for what a good website might look like and what’s definitely rubbish. Already from the result output I could clearly plot my strategy for which sites I’d visit and which ones I’d avoid. They started from the top left corner. Once we’d learned to click through to the actual web-pages behind Google, the problem repeated itself. Random Russian websites do contain a very large proportion of random Russian sheit. Such is life, and we’re used to it. But someone who reads from the top left corner will have to wade through oceans of it before the actual jackalope recipe appears. Inevitably I had to leave them to it to get their skills through practice after having explained the concept of large quantities of unwanted material surrounding the actually useful information - and introduced them to the scroll wheel.
There the (lengthy - sorry!) story ends. I believe it’s only really by practice and gradual understanding or ‘feel’ for the internet that you can acquire these oh-so-necssary filters of ours and start imagining new uses for the technology. I just have this nagging wish that I’d have video-taped it all - it’s not that often that I come across people who have never seen spam - and who patiently try to understand what the internet is all about despite their first meeting with all the rubbish that it throws at them. We did have hare on New Year’s eve in the end - and quite a few teeth were almost broken on all the lead that was still embedded in it. I still think that Jackalope would have been tastier - but there were no recipies on the web for cooking sucha beast.
About happiness
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 | Uncategorized, events, leisure | No Comments
I’ve been browsing talks on TED this weekend. There is an awful lot of inspirational material to be had there on a lot of different topics. I watch the talks and I try to glean some tricks on public speaking from the good speakers - along with some ‘what-not-to-dos’ from the not-so-good speakers. This time I’ve looked at TED’s happiness stream. These are talks about… well, what makes us happy. I especially liked this one, on how we synthesize happiness.
In my family we’ve got a saying: all that happens is for the best. So the worst thing that happens to you is also the best thing that could possibly happen. And you know what’s good about that saying? You can never prove it wrong. How crushed I was when I was not allowed to read Psychology at Copenhagen Univeristy - and how happy am I now looking at it in retrospect, from my PhD desk at Oxford University! Who knows what would have happened if I’d got plan A to work? Answer is: we’ll never know - and truth is: we don’t want to know!
This talk is about something similar - it explores how we build happiness out of even hopelessly inferior situations to those of plan A. In my case plan B turned out to be exciting - but what if it doesn’t? Turns out, we’re still going to be happy - genuinely happy! And it turns out that giving us the choice between plan A and plan B isn’t always to our benefit - but we stubbornly believe that it is. We don’t always do what’s best for us.
What a lovely view!
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 | Web 2.0, leisure, tools | 2 Comments
Yes, it’s official, I’m addicted to StatCounter. Even more than I’m addicted to Facebook.
StatCounter is a tool that lets you folow the traffic on your blog and tells you where in the world people have viewed it. Now, I’m aware of the power of information visualization and all that, but it is a completely different feeling when you are visualizing your own data, your own little creation of no particular importance to the world in general, but important enough for these people to have a look and a read. Thus, my very favourite function on StatCounter: the map. And here’s the current map that makes me so happy - there’s something magical about knowing that someone in Iran or in Peru has looked at what you’ve written.